I learned enough math in school to do basic addition, but I still failed to put two and two together on a recent visit to Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska.

After reading my story, Urbana resident Janet Ebert emailed me a gentle admonishment for missing the significance of the name Mendenhall.

Like me, Ebert has an undergraduate degree from Ohio State University. Unlike me, Ebert also has a doctorate from OSU. (Maybe that’s why she made the connection I missed.)

Ebert noted that Mendenhall Glacier is named after renowned Ohio State Professor Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, whose name also graces Mendenhall Laboratory on the Oval.

Ebert knew about the connection when she visited Juneau in 2005 with the OSU marching band’s Alumni Band; she even got to share the story with an impressed guide on a glacier tour bus.

Mendenhall, an interesting and influential man, was the first person chosen for the faculty of the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College when it opened in 1873. Ohio A&M soon became Ohio State.

Mendenhall taught physics and mechanics during his time at Ohio State and received the first honorary Ph.D. awarded by the university.

A highly respected scientist, too, he helped develop several innovative methods to measure gravity and earthquakes and predict the weather.

Between stints at OSU, Mendenhall spent several years teaching physics at the Tokyo Imperial University and helped found the Seismological Society of Japan to study earthquakes. He also served as a professor at the U.S. Signal Corps and president of the Rose Polytechnic Institute in Indiana and of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

It was while serving as superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, though, that Mendenhall would see his name become forever etched in ice. During his tenure, the organization was charged with defining the rugged boundary between Alaska and Canada. That boundary runs very near a glacier that had been called “Aak’w Kwaan” by the Tlingit Indians.

After the survey, the name on the maps was “Mendenhall Glacier.”

Although he was at the forefront of scientific inquiry in his day, Mendenhall proved less prescient in at least one area.

Later in life, serving on the Ohio State Board of Trustees, he strongly opposed a major campus construction project. He argued vehemently that the new horseshoe-shaped monstrosity to be known as Ohio Stadium would never find enough football fans to fill its projected seating capacity of 63,000.

Perhaps I should note that Mendenhall also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Michigan.

I’ll leave it to others to put two and two together.

— Steve Stephens can be reached at sstephens@dispatch.com or on Twitter @SteveStephens.